Top 500 Steven Erikson Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “The end of the world is announced with a kind word.”

— Steven Erikson

352. “Guilt is the first weed we pluck, to keep the garden pretty and smelling sweet.”

— Steven Erikson

353. “I was once told that dreams are worthy things,” said Emancipor, “even if they end up in misery and unending horror.” “Ah, and who told you that?” He shrugged. “My wife.”

— Steven Erikson

354. “I hear Seven Cities natives grow fruit just so they can eat the larvae in them.”

— Steven Erikson

355. “The air swirled into darkness around Paran. He blinked, saw the trees of the estate garden rising before him.”

— Steven Erikson

356. “Heed the lesson there, son.” “What lesson?” “Every decision you make can change the world. The best life is the one the gods don’t notice. You want to live free, boy, live quietly.” “I want to be a soldier. A hero.” “You’ll grow out of it.”

— Steven Erikson

357. “Soldiers have no imagination, meaning they’re capable of vast surprises.”

— Steven Erikson

358. “To know and to understand that we must all die, Trull Sengar, is not to worship death. To know and to understand is itself magic, for it made us stand tall.”

— Steven Erikson

359. “Not that freedom ensured happiness. Indeed, to be free was to live in absence. Of responsibilities, of loyalties, of the pressures that expectation imposed.”

— Steven Erikson

360. “Why not worship money? At least its rewards are obvious and immediate. But no, that was simplistic. Letherii worship was more subtle, its ethics bound to those traits and habits that well served the acquisition of wealth. Diligence, discipline, hard work, optimism, the personalization of glory. And the corresponding evils: sloth, despair and the anonymity of failure. The world was brutal enough to winnow one from the other and leave no room for doubt or mealy equivocation.”

— Steven Erikson

361. “Then we’re dead all that much sooner. So it goes.”

— Steven Erikson

362. “We have a talent for disguising greed under the cloak of freedom. As for past acts of depravity, we prefer to ignore those. Progress, after all, means to look ever forward, and whatever we have trampled in our wake is best forgotten.”

— Steven Erikson

363. “How many of us bow before a god in the desperate hope that we can somehow shape our fate? Praying to that familiar face pushes away our terror of the unknown – the unknown being the future. Who knows, maybe these Tiste Andii are the only ones among us all who see the truth, the truth being oblivion.”

— Steven Erikson

364. “Bloodflies rode her drawn gasps into her mouth, biting as she gagged and spat.”

— Steven Erikson

365. “When it is all one can do to simply hold on, then to suffer is to weather a deluge no god can ease.”

— Steven Erikson

366. “To draw a weapon is to announce an end to uncertainty.”

— Steven Erikson

367. “Desires should never be justified,′ Tehol said, wagging a finger. ‘All you end up doing is illuminating the hidden reasons by virtue of their obvious absence.”

— Steven Erikson

368. “Fiddler straightened, eyes on the stars glittering overhead. Desert stars, sharp diamonds that ever seemed eager to draw blood.”

— Steven Erikson

369. “Something’s nibbling my spleen!”

— Steven Erikson

370. “Fanaticism was so popular. There had to be a reason for that, didn’t there? Some vast reward to the end of thinking, some great bliss to the blessing of idiocy.”

— Steven Erikson

371. “Too old to dream of perfection, perhaps, she had instead discovered a certain delicious appeal in flaws.”

— Steven Erikson

372. “Hard lives begat hard laws, not just in the necessities of living, but also in those of believing.”

— Steven Erikson

373. “Eddies of dry wind whipped tatters of cloth and reed paper about in dancing circles.”

— Steven Erikson

374. “Stop talking like a sailor, Adjutant Stormy,’ Nok said. A smile amidst the red, bristling beard. ‘Ain’t no Adjutant any more, Admiral.’ Thin brows rose, and Nok said, ‘Title alone gifts the bearer with intelligence?’ Stormy nodded. ‘That it does, sir. Which is why Gesler’s a sergeant and I’m a corporal. We get stupider every year that passes.’ ‘And.”

— Steven Erikson

375. “Failure wasn’t a pleasant notion. It stung. It burned like acid.”

— Steven Erikson

376. “Kadaspala worshipped colour. It was the gift of light; and in its tones, heavy and light, faint and rich, was painted all of life.”

— Steven Erikson

377. “The drunk answers every assault with smirking equanimity,’ observed Haut, pouring his cup full again. ‘All reasoned words thud like pebbles in the sand. Made immune, I imbibe the nectar of the gods.”

— Steven Erikson

378. “Absence of doubt? No, nothing so egotistic as that. Nimander has plenty of doubts, so many that he’s lost his fear of them. He accepts them as easily as anything else. Is that the secret? Is that the very definition of greatness?”

— Steven Erikson

379. “Precipitous creature,′ Kruppe muttered, reaching for the mug of wine the man had left behind. ‘Ah, look at this,’ he said, frowning up at Crokus, ‘nigh two-thirds full. A potential waste!’ Kruppe drank it down in one swift gulp, then sighed. ‘Said potential averted, Dessembrae be praised.”

— Steven Erikson

380. “Love could be such a squalid emotion: burning bright in the midst of pathos, the subject of pity and contempt, it blazed with brilliant stupidity all the same.”

— Steven Erikson

381. “So you ain’t nearly as good as you think you are. What a shock. Look at your clothes and armour – you’re chopped to pieces, O mighty assassin.”

— Steven Erikson

382. “They are a generation that has tasted blood, and where horror fades, nostalgia seeps in. In war all is simple, and there is appeal in this. Who among us is comforted by confusion, uncertainty?”

— Steven Erikson

383. “Autumn rains drumming overhead, they had squatted in a half-circle, facing north, and watched as seven robed and hooded figures approached.”

— Steven Erikson

384. “Skintick could not find himself in that future. He did not expect to complete this journey. He was not sure he even wanted to.”

— Steven Erikson

385. “Memory did not let go; it remained the net dragged in one’s wake, with all sorts of strange things snarled in the knotted strands.”

— Steven Erikson

386. “Opposite the Half-Axe was the narrow-fronted entrance to a shop devoted to short lengths of rope and wooden poles a man and a half high. Tehol had no idea how such a specialized enterprise could survive, especially in this unravelled, truncated market, yet its door had remained open for almost six centuries, locked up each night by a short length of rope and a wooden pole.”

— Steven Erikson

387. “Kneels? Falters? Look to the night sky, foolish man, and gauge the victor in the contest between Dark and Light.”

— Steven Erikson

388. “When those dreams in that unreachable future suddenly rise up around you, how can you not be blinded to their truths? All at once, it is here. All at once, you are living in its very midst. Why then must you seek to pull away? He.”

— Steven Erikson

389. “Is possession a virtue? Is a lifetime of working for some rich toad a virtue? Is loyal employment in some merchant house a virtue? Loyal to what? To whom? Oh, have they paid for that loyalty with a hundred docks a week? Like any other commodity? But then, which version is truer – the virtue of self-serving acquisitiveness or the virtue of loyalty to one’s employer? Are.”

— Steven Erikson

390. “The past is a demon that not even death can shake.”

— Steven Erikson

391. “Instead, we fell inside ourselves, ever deeper, that endless eating and spitting out and eating all we spat out – this is the seductive sustenance of hatred and spite, of rage and vengeance.”

— Steven Erikson

392. “He had let age take hold of him, as if ennui was an old man’s final gift to himself – the blessed embrace of indifference in the guise of wisdom.”

— Steven Erikson

393. “Secrets have power so long as they remain secrets.”

— Steven Erikson

394. “We are nothing but our own needs. She but showed each of us the face we hide from ourselves and everyone else. She shamed us by exposing our truths.”

— Steven Erikson

395. “The power he commanded insisted upon subjects. Strength was ever relative, and he could not dominate without the company of the dominated.”

— Steven Erikson

396. “Age was a demon, a haunting that slipped into the bones whispering weakness and frailty. It stole his muscles, his agility, and the quickness of his wit. It seemed a miserable reward for surviving, all things told, which was proof enough that life was a fool’s bargain.”

— Steven Erikson

397. “They take us at this moment, these unwavering men and women who presume to rule over us, and but point us in the direction of a weaker victim. This is their game, knowing or not, and as ever the assumption is that we’ll never turn on our masters – so long as an enemy remains within reach of our blunted, frustrated fury. And.”

— Steven Erikson

398. “I would hold, my friend, that what you describe is but one side of the matter, and indeed one that looks only inward, as if the borders of your life enclose everything to be valued, while what lies beyond is of no worth whatsoever.”

— Steven Erikson

399. “The bully’s greatest terror,′ Bugg said, ‘comes when he meets someone bigger and meaner –.”

— Steven Erikson

400. “I, Borduke of the 6th squad in the 9th Company of the 8th Legion, swear on the downy belly of the Queen of Dreams that the creature before me is a natural, unaltered Birdshit scorpion, and may my father’s ghost remain in its tomb, since the inheritance was mine to lose anyway, right? Dead means you don’t care any more, right? It had better, because if it doesn’t, then I’m doomed to paternal haunting for the rest of my days.”

— Steven Erikson